Every once in a while, readers just want to be entertained by a novel. “The Accidental Animal Copy” by Stevie Lynne offers that kind of fun. The book is full of humorous characters and events.

Part of a series about the small town of Brownville, Vermont, the book centers around Rachel Tillison. A recent college graduate with a degree in computer science, Rachel can’t find a job in her field, and she can’t hold down the job she has found as a barista. To make matters worse, her live-in boyfriend has just dumped her.

With a ton of debt and no income, she takes on the first employment that is offered. She moves back home to Brownville and becomes the temporary animal-control officer for the town, thanks to her uncle, the police chief.

The job doesn’t offer a salary, just a per-visit fee for responding to complaints about animals in town. Rachel quickly learns that she deserves hazard pay as she finds herself set upon, often violently, by all manner of creatures, particularly a hostile goat and an over-sexed turkey.

She is soon drawn into the middle of mysterious goings on. Dogs are disappearing all over town, often from fenced-in enclosures from which they cannot have escaped by themselves.

A strange white creature is visible from time to the time in the woods. And a mysterious, definitely not nice man seems to be threatening townspeople.

All these matters come to a head as a hurricane barrels toward the town, forcing Rachel to find temporary shelter for a variety of animals as she and her friends finally begin to figure out what is going on in Brownville.

“The Accidental Animal Cop” is fiction without a doubt. It’s not entirely clear how large Brownville is. It’s large enough to have its own police station, newspaper, and dining establishments. It also experiences an enormous number of animal-related emergencies.

Nevertheless, the town is small enough for Rachel to know pretty much everyone by name.

I’m not sure how those contrasting qualities fit together. Fortunately, Stevie Lynne keeps the action moving along quickly enough so that readers are encouraged to suspend disbelief.

Rachel is a fun narrator. In between handling animal emergencies, saving human and animal lives, and investigating mysteries, she manages to mature. She begins to advocate for herself as an employee and learns to treat the public with tact.

She even finds a new boyfriend to replace the one for whom she pines at the beginning of the book.

I look forward to reading more about Brownville in Stevie Lynn’s next installment.

Stevie Lynn is a pen name of Stephanie Funk, who has lived in Greenfield for three decades. “The Accidental Animal Cop” is available at Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls as well as at the Greenfield Farmer’s Coop. It may also be ordered from the author’s website. www.stephaniefunk.com.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.